Monthly (Comic) Book Club - September - Batman: Damned21105
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Monthly (Comic) Book Club - September - Batman: Damned Reading Schedule September 2 - 15: Batman: Damned #1 September 16 - 22: Batman: Damned #2 September 23 - 29: Batman: Damned #3 Discussion topic ideas: * Thoughts on the story or artwork * Details in the story, artwork, or presentation * References to outside events or other works of fiction * Making of/Behind the Scenes details * Editions you will be reading from * Items in your collection pertaining to this week’s selection |
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| Woo! Okay so the broad strokes of issue 1 is that Batman has been wounded and is unsure of what happened the night before. John Constantine is able to patch him up and the news is saying the Joker is dead and Batman doesn’t know who might’ve milled him. Batman goes out in search of clues. Commissioner Gordon comes across a transient that claims to have seen a monster commit a murder but he flees when Batman tries to talk to him. Brice goes undercover as a homeless man to find him but is unsuccessful. News of several abductions leads Batman to a cathedral where a crucifix is defaced in a very Joker-like way. Like I said, those are the broad strokes. The story is interspersed with scenes of Bruce Wayne’s past, often with the Enchantress appearing in them, but all pointing at a less than ideal family life for Bruce growing up. In addition to Constantine, other more supernatural characters like Dead Man and Zatanna make brief appearances hinting at some unseen mystery. Speaking of mystery, there are two reported John Does found. In the news cast Joker is fished out of the river, and is presumably the body that has gone missing. We are still left with the mystery of who the John Doe on the bridge was. Beyond all the explicit narrative, the story is permeated with Constantine’s cryptic narration. He is very much the storyteller and as he mentions at his introduction, he’s an unreliable one at that. At times it feels like it is adding color to what we are seeing in the panel. The rest of the times it could be that I am reading this too late and I’m tired or he’s being to winding and ambiguous to make clear sense. I’ll definitely give it another look when I’m more awake. Finally, mention has to be made of Lee Bermejo’s artwork. It is absolutely fantastic throughout the book. He imbues everything a great level of detail that makes everything feel realistic however his painting and his color choices never let you forget that this isn’t our reality. It feels like a living painting or a reality somehow different from our own. It reminds me a lot of Alex Ross except that Ross, I think, wants to bring these characters into our reality more than Bermejo wants to bring us into the characters’. As I said, I think I’m a bit too tired to fully grasp everything that the story is trying to present but at some level it reminds me a lot of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Arkham was very forwardly surreal whereas Damned is trying to ground us all the while hinting at something just beyond a curtain we can’t necessarily see but definitely feel. |
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 If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| I read Damned a while ago, closer to when it came out. I remember finding it a bit odd, maybe unsatisfying, but we'll see how a second read goes. There are side references to other Batman stuff. The early reference to a joke about a beam of light, I think, is to the one the Joker tells Batman at the end of The Killing Joke. There's also a lot on death and creation and the occult, with appearances by Constantine (the narrator), the Enchantress, Deadman, and Zatanna. The police found the Joker's body, and Batman seems to have been there, but he can't remember what happened and then it appears that the Joker maybe kidnapped a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. A homeless man may have seen what happened but Batman couldn't catch him. So this issue sets up the mystery. I also like Bermejo's art a lot. I'm not a frequent DC reader but I've seen a lot of his covers. He does great texture work. It's similar in a way to Mark Brooks, who also has a realistic style and good stuff with texture, but Bermejo's tends to be dark while Brooks has a bright, fun style. |
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 Not trying to be an ass since February 12, 2020.
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| @xkonk bat-wang didn’t do anything for you ? I don’t remember much I’ll have to re read this one. | ||
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| @HulkSmash I think I saw the unedited version online but the controversy was way overblown. He spends about a page walking around the mansion/batcave naked for anyone that needs it. | ||
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| @xkonk I never really understood why it even became a controversy. Granted, I wasn’t alive when Watchmen first debuted but did Doctor Manhattan cause the same amount of noise? Damned is essentially a Vertigo book and I find it hard to imagine that there wasn’t already some male frontal nudity elsewhere among those titles. Was it just because it was Batman? Azarello has responded to DC’s handling of the issue and suggested it was at least partly responsible for both he and Bermejo focusing on work elsewhere |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| If memory serves, it was mostly just that it was Batman. And people are a bunch of prudes. | ||
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| I’m sure the ease of mass communication via the internet and social media now compared to 1986 would’ve contributed to it But still. It was a stupid, stupid thing to cause a ruckus over |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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xkonk private msg quote post Address this user | |
| I'm out of town this weekend so time for another issue! If something in this series was going to inspire outrage, I would have thought it would be turning the Demon into a rapper. And while the first issue sets up an intriguing mystery (what happened so that Batman can't remember? is the Joker actually dead?), this issue does nothing to progress it. We get some more background on Bruce's boyhood trauma, which also gives his parents' relationship a much rougher depiction than I've seen anywhere else, and there's an attack by the Joker that turns out to be Harley. She drugs and tries to rape(?) Batman, and the issue ends with him on his way to strangling her to death. On the whole it feels like it was trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy more than telling a story. It's a vibe, not a plot. That's ok sometimes, but when you start with a mystery you want some plot. We'll see how it wraps up next time. |
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| Issue 2 feels like it goes by very quickly. The issue count doesn’t feel significantly different than the first but there’s definitely lest progression in this issue. Interestingly, the childhood flashbacks are what’s intriguing me the most so far. It reminds me a lot of Garth Ennis’ and Jason Aaron’s Punisher flashback stories like Tyger, Tyger, Born, and Frank. I’ve always felt Batman and Punisher were very similar characters in their dedication to their mission. Their origins, as they are widely known are simple and while they work well enough, once you’ve seen more of what each character puta themselves through you do wonder if their dedication comes from more than one traumatic event. Yes that may be what broke the camel’s back but seeing that they have, in essence, been created across their entire lives leading to that final impetus makes sense to me. Speaking of making sense, the Demon as a rapper did make a kind of sense to me so it really didn’t bother me. Though again, he doesn’t really add much to the main narrative so it feels more like a little detour. When we finally do get back to the Joker story, it doesn’t really connect to the abductions that ended the previous issue. It kind just happens that the “Joker” is attacking Gotham right next to the Demon’s nightclub. I did like most of the Harley sequence, though the sexual assault doesn’t quite make sense to me. That Harley would attack Gotham dressed as the Joker and want to kill Batman, and wanting him to kill her makes sense, assuming Harley’s still in her pre-liberation stage. The allusions to Joker’s abuse of Harley, also works, I think. I liked the through line of “is Batman capable of murder?” question. We don’t know yet if Batman killed the Joker and early in the issue you have Constantine quipping that Batman is very close to killing again when Batman’s close to pushing Constantine off the building. Batman admits that he doesn’t like Constantine but insists that he’d never kill him, to which Constantine replies with “Never say Never.” In Bruce’s flashback, when his mother drives his father out of the house, in his anger and grief Bruce plays out killing her with his toy gun. In her sadness she asks him to never point a gun at someone, no matter what, which is of course reflected in Batman’s longtime “no guns” rule. But again, never say never. The second to last page reminded me a lot of the ending to the Killing Joke where Batman kills the Joker in the rain but leaves it just vague enough.  |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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xkonk private msg quote post Address this user | |
| I read the third issue yesterday. Even though I read the series before, I did not remember the first half of this issue at all. I think it's because all the mystical stuff is basically standing in the way of resolving the plot, which Batman calls out when he says he's going to the place he should have gone to first... at the end of the issue. That said, the mystical stuff does give a bit more of a reason to explore Batman's origin. I'm not sure how much it adds to what's already been said about it though. Sticking on the topic of controversies, I could see the ending reveal being controversial. Batman does seem to have killed Joker, albeit by lack of action (sort of). Batman and Joker are fighting, he punches Joker, Joker trips over a guy and falls off the bridge. Batman had a moment where he could have grabbed Joker but doesn't because he thought his wound was fatal. Batman's no-kill rule has been pretty absolute throughout his modern career, so letting Joker die like this could be taken as a big violation of his character. On the flip side, it's hard to imagine that nothing like this ever happened to some random goon in all the fights Batman has been part of. And, maybe more importantly to the story, Batman wishes he could take it back at the end. The ending is then a bit ambiguous as the Joker does appear to be alive, but is Batman? On the whole I think it was an interesting story but not my favorite type. I do like Bermejo's art quite a bit. And I can see why this was in a spin-off imprint instead of a regular Batman series, although I'm not sure it was so 'adult' to need to be in Black Label. I guess with Vertigo being folded, this is about the only outlet for this kind of stuff. |
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